1. Field of the Disclosure
The invention concerns a device and a method according to the main clause of claims 1 and 16 and in particular for bringing into contact and dissolving of mainly very coarse solids of different shape and size in a fluid, in order to dissolve them by chemical reaction or dispersion.
2. Description of the Related Art
A device for bringing into contact of solid reactants with liquids is known from EP 0 790 859 B1, that comprises a container that can be filled with the liquid and a sieve drum that is built into the container and closed on all sides, that is rotatable on a hollow shaft around 360° and is immersed into a vat that can be lowered. The sieve drum in the known device can be loaded with the solid reactants exclusively through its hollow shaft. This has disadvantage that the maximum amount of solid used and the size of the pieces are limited by the shaft diameter. The fact that the hollow shafts, which are mainly occupied by conveyor systems, are narrow leads to the fact that the liquid reactant must be fed into the vat below the drum, and it must flow through the wall of the drum in order to come into contact with the solid. This occurs only partially and has a considerable adverse impact on the performance of the device because of a deficiency of the liquid reactants in the reaction zone within the sieve drum. In addition, when the drum has to be inspected, expensive dismounting of large wall areas of the drum is required. Furthermore, the relatively large shaft diameters reduce the reaction space of the device greatly, so that the volume that is usable for the reaction is definitely less than 50% of the drum volume. Moreover, the entire bulk load falls into the drum only at two points, namely in the area of the front disks, so that the available reaction space is naturally filled nonuniformly, which again results in a reduction of capacity. Moreover, in this device the drum diameter must be increased in part just so that the gases and vapors that are formed in the reaction chamber can flow without any problem through the upper sieve surface that is not in contact with the liquid.
A device is known from EP 0 946 276 in which, using a rotary grate that moves in a briskly boiling vat, large solid pieces can be brought into contact with a liquid. The disadvantage of this device is the very high energy consumption as a result of the extremely large amount of fluid to be circulated for the briskly boiling layer. The economy of this construction arises mainly when it is used to re-equip reactors from Patent EP 0 111 115.